One of the most common focal points of my "agile coaching" has very little to do with agility and everything to do with enabling a high-performing team environments - stabilizing and focusing teams.
Bob Sutton discusses this concept of breaking-up teams constantly as one of the dumbest practices used by U.S. Companies - I agree! For more information, check out the book Leading Teams by Richard Hackman. 3. Breaking-up Teams Constantly. American companies often seem to love moving people around constantly, breaking-up teams, giving people new experiences, and so on. Certainly, there is a time for fresh blood, but if you read J. Richard Hackman's Leading Teams you will see that the weight of the evidence is that breaking up teams less often rather than more often is linked to all sorts of effectiveness indicators. Also, see this post about the Miracle on the Hudson where I discuss this literature. Read more at bobsutton.typepad.com |
CIO Magazine's Eugene Nizker highlights a number of Agile 2009 sessions focused on Agile Leadership this year. | 7 Agile Leadership Lessons for the Suits |
CIO Eugene Nizker attended this year's Agile conference and returned with several suggestions for CIOs, IT managers and programming team leaders. |
| 1. Trust the Wisdom of Teams |
| 2. Even Self-Organized Teams Require Coaching |
| 4. Motivate, Don't De-Motivate: Appraisals, Bonuses and Compensation |
| 6. Avoid Building Plank Roads |
| Time after time, corporations introduce Agile without understanding its key philosophical distinction: Agile development is not a set of instructions—it is a mind-set . If you implement Agile techniques as a set of prescriptions, the result will be much worse than any waterfall. You will discredit the Agile idea, and also you will fail the project, break the existing (albeit waterfall-ish) mechanism and ruin team morale. Don't blame the methodology.Read more at mobile.cio.com |
Revisiting the leader's role in designing, stewarding and teaching a learning organization which can more easily respond to change and grow in highly-dynamic markets - or otherwise - organizational agility.
A leader as designer takes the systems view, evaluating the organizational framework and structures underlying behaviors and actions. Moving from single-loop learning (reacting to behaviors and surface changes) to double-loop learning (reframing our thinking and the structures underlying our thinking) to triple-loop learning (changing our perceptions and underlying values)
A leader as steward of the vision. Stewardship involves a commitment to, and responsibility for the vision, but it does not mean that the leader owns it. Rather, they shepherd it through the organization.
A leader as teacher can influence people’s view of reality at four levels: events, patterns of behavior, systemic structures and purpose. By and large most leaders tend to focus on the first two levels. Learning Leaders attend to all four, but focus predominantly on purpose and systemic structure. Moreover they “teach” people throughout the organization to do likewise.
Agile organizations must be learning organizations and learning organizations only learn through learning leaders. The learning organization |
The basic rationale for such organizations is that in situations of rapid
change only those that are flexible, adaptive and productive will excel. For
this to happen, it is argued, organizations need to ‘discover how to tap
people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all
levels’ (ibid.: 4). |
Leading
the learning organization |
In a learning organization, leaders are designers,
stewards and teachers. They are responsible for building organizations
were people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity,
clarify vision, and improve shared mental models – that is they are responsible
for learning…. Learning organizations will remain a ‘good idea’… until people
take a stand for building such organizations. Taking this stand is the first
leadership act, the start of inspiring
(literally ‘to breathe life into’) the vision of the learning organization. (Senge
1990: 340) Read more at www.infed.org |
Ants were once thought to be specialists - being born with DNA set up for a specific chore in the ant colony. Recently, however, researchers have discovered that ants are actually generalists and can perform any task in the colony. However, they typically perform one task at a time to increase efficiency through less task switching.
Working on a Scrum team we often discuss the benefits and tradeoffs of generalization vs. specialization. Scrum teams that have versatile members - those that are deep in some areas, but are flexible and capable to assist other areas less aligned with their specialty are more productive than teams of specialists.
The other benefit of Scrum is the reduction of task switching through more direct focus of the entire team within a Sprint. The costs of task switching have been well documented, but this provides yet another case of nature avoiding the practice.
Thanks to Stacia Broderick for identifying this article.
Color-Coded Ants Reveal their Efficiency |
| A rainbow-hued experiment from the University of Arizona proves that ants aren’t the one-career workers we thought they were. Here, rock ants dedicate all their energy to caring for their limbless larvae. Scientists once believed this type of job specialization was hardwired into each ant—that is, individual ants were capable of doing only one job—and specialization was the key to their efficiency. Having certain individuals serve exclusively as nurses, nest builders or foragers earned ant colonies the title “superorganism.” But biologist Anna Dornhaus color-coded 1,200 ants using paint to identify individuals and set them on various tasks. “It turns out,” she says, “each individual ant seems to be equally good at every job.” Instead, colonies may increase efficiency by saving in “switching costs,” the time it takes a worker to physically move from one task to another.Read more at www.popsci.com |
|
